Miasma
by saphiredmoon
Summary: Not everyone believes that Superheroes are a benefit to society. The only Supers publicly known are the Incredibles and Frozone, but that doesn't mean there aren't others.
1. Miasma

_**Miasma**_

"…_And so Metroville is saved yet again by the Incredibles!"_

The television set roared on about the latest conquer of the Incredible family. In the background, one could see the flames burst around a nearby building and then the video feed would turn to record one of the supers running into the building, no fear whatsoever in their actions. To many it would seem that the supers were amazing, heroic, someone to look up to and be expected to do the right thing. But that particular belief had no such applause form the two people staring back at the television set.

A married couple, old enough to understand the ways of the world, but not young enough to enjoy it. The woman was approximately a little less then five feet tall, her facial features drab and bleak. The wrinkles underneath her eyes lay flat and limp as they drooped downward while her mouth bent down into an untactful frown. Her hair was dyed an unnatural brown color, too warm and bright for her composition and it was tightly knotted into a bun at the back of her head. The man on the other hand was definitely taller, perhaps five feet eight, but he slouched often making he seem weak, feeble, and older then he was. His hair was starting to recede to the far reaches of his head, exposing it to the elements if it weren't for the rancid green cap he almost always wore. On the cap a simple blocky lettered 'Eat At Joes' stood out, its white thread tarnished and now looked like a dirt Grey color. Unlike his wife, he had relatively few wrinkles, but his skin looked parched and dry resembling a waterhole that had evaporated because of the heat from the sun.

Despite these differences, they also had many similarities. Both were lanky from their age, their youth had long since disappeared. Their attire was usually worn out with the occasional hole here and there, except on the rare occasion that they needed to go out. Then would they search the far reaches of their closets to look for pleasantly formal attire. But that was rare, and most likely their fresh clothes already had colonies of moths hampered within its reaches. But the most startling resemblance was their eyes. They were sharp, tactful, and had little warmth. Over the years they had grown cold and hard. The only thing that would have made them seem warm was the fact that they always wore their wedding bands, ever since the day they were wed.

Slowly, the lady lifted herself up from the couch that she had been sitting on. Her scowl showing her irritability with the news on the television. Her husband grabbed the remote as she headed toward the kitchen, changing the channel to something more desirable. It seemed that football was to be the choice today. He settled down into the crevice he created in the couch and slumped back against the side.

"Clarice," the man said, "Can you get me some popcorn?"

Clarice turned, her eyes having melted some of its hardness from her husband's remark, replied.

"Do you want microwave popcorn, or do you want it made over the stove?" She grabbed for a pot, already knowing the answer, but she had always given him the two choices.

Her husband gave no reply, already familiar with the routine.

Through the house, the simple pop-popping sound could be heard from the kitchen. The rest of the day continued in the same manner until it was evening and time for dinner. The pasta on the stove boiled endlessly, while Clarice chopped up some freshly bought vegetables from the market. Her husband sat at the table, reading the daily newspaper. They both stopped when they heard someone come down from the stairs.

As the creaks in the stairs became louder the couple knew that their…housemate had reached the end of the stairs and was now heading for the kitchen. The both stared toward the kitchen entrance as she came in. She was a normal sized girl, taller then Clarice by a few inches. Her hair was an ash brown color and it was unruly. It spread out around her creating a tangled mess. Her face was round, but also retained a small amount of oval shape making her dark brown eyes and plump lips seem larger. Her clothes were the only improvement compared to those of the married couple. They weren't old and torn and they added a bit of color to her skin which was a very light caramel color. She looked back at both of them and then quietly sat down in one of the chairs at the kitchen table.

It was Clarice that spoke the first word.

"Why haven't you brushed your hair?" She did not make any move towards acknowledging the new arrival in the kitchen.

"I was doing homework and reading for a while, so I think it just skipped my mind." She answered truthfully, but it sounded like she had done something worse.

"You will not eat at my table looking like that. Go and fix it."

The girl looked back at Clarice and then made her way up the stairs again. When she made it to her room, she entered and closed the door silently behind her. Her dresser was in the far corner of the room so she walked over and grabbed the brush that was placed on the top. Then she sulked into the bathroom that was connected to her room and stared at her self in the mirror. She was not happy at the person staring back at her. Then she proceeded to untangling her hair, wincing every time she encountered a knot in its tousled jungle. When she was done she stared back into the mirror. The occupant staring back at her no longer had a severely tangled hairdo, but instead had a thick mane of slightly curved straight hair that poofed out at the bottom.

She walked back to the dresser to place the brush, but then momentarily distracted herself as she looked up at a framed art project she did in the first grade. In the frame there was a regular sized piece of construction paper with the name 'Amelia' in jerky scribbled writing. It was made using a hot pink marker, which she also used to print out little hearts around her name. She remembered being so proud of it that she could hardly wait to show her parents her masterpiece. That specific memory would always haunt her.

_The trees in front of the building sparkled with the newly acquired rain drops from the rain earlier. The sun was out and off in the distance if you squinted your eyes really hard, you could just barely make out the colors of a far away rainbow. The quiet atmosphere was soon broken up by the small cheers of first graders glad that the school day was over and that the weekend laid before them. The parents waited patiently as they watched the children swarm over, each with a brightly colored piece of paper to hold and show off. A little girl with her brown hair shinning in the sun ran over to her parents who smiled as she reached up to hug them. Happily, she showed them her paper, a light blue piece of construction paper with her name on it. She beamed happily as her parents smiled at each other and looked over her creation. _

_Then a week later they stopped smiling at her when they found out what she had become._

That was the last time she could remember her parents being happy with her. Now she was just a nuisance. A reminder of the little girl they had once had who was normal and who would have grown up being normal.

For the longest time when she first found out, she wondered why her parents didn't lover her anymore. She wondered why they looked at her like she was the plague rather then their own daughter? Then she got mad. Mad that because she knew she was different now and they treated her differently. But now she was sad because her parents couldn't accept the fact that she was different. She had long since accepted herself, and often times she wondered what would have happened if she had been normal. But despite this she was somewhat happy at how she turned out. Her life may not be happy, but she believed that she understood the negative side of the world a bit better then the average teenager and she believed that perhaps that made her a better person inside because she had a bit more mercy on behalf of her life then her parents did. It wasn't something to be terribly proud of, but it was something positive that came out of her situation.

As if to confirm her thoughts, Amelia stared at her hand and watched as soft green smoke came out of her pores. It didn't float onto the ground or to the ceiling, but instead ran over her skin as it engulfed her body. It covered her in a thin layer of smog, barely giving off a greenish hue. The layer floated around her like steam off of a hot dish, dissipating as it floated too far from her head. Amelia found herself feeling lighter as she started to levitate. She smiled, enjoying the fact that she can somewhat defy gravity in her current state. If only her miasma was as harmless as steam or smoke, then she wouldn't be afraid of hurting people.


	2. Noticed

_**Noticed**_

Amelia sighed as she walked down the sidewalk, the sun disappearing behind one of the few grey clouds that inhabited the sky. The night before had gone so well if it wasn't for the fact that she had dissolved the clothes she had been wearing without realizing it. It was the biggest annoyance in her life. At least now she could control it, before it had been a curse, killing and harming everything that she came into contact with. Amelia tried not to bump into the other students that were heading across the lawn to the front of entrance of the school as she recalled some of the 'accidents' she had.

_Amelia looked above the sink to stare at herself in the bathroom mirror. She looked at her face, pushed her eyelids down, and even checked to see if her tongue had changed a different color. If she didn't look different and she didn't do anything bad, why were her parents avoiding her? They were even afraid of touching her now. Amelia repeated the questions that spun through her head over and over as she grabbed some of her hair and let it spill out until it fell back into place. Her mom loved to comb her hair, and now she had to comb it herself. Her mom also said that her hair was very pretty and was a special color of brown. She liked it when people said that she was special and pretty._

_She climbed down the small stool that she had been standing on. Something was wrong. Amelia couldn't figure out what, but she knew something was. She walked back to her room, the bright pink walls offering her a little solace from her problem. Grabbing her Raggedy Anne doll from its place on a small purple chair next to her play house set, she sat on her bed and began to practice her new trick. Carefully she pushed the smoke to come out of her hand, smiling as it made her hand turn green. Slowly she made it hotter and then cooler, the brightness of the green altering with the change in temperature. She toyed around with the smoke like a kid would do when they figured out that they could wiggle their ears or noses. _

_After a few minutes it didn't take her long to see that her Raggedy Anne doll was becoming smaller as the smoke started to eat through it. Amelia dropped the doll and fell off her bed from the shock. The resulting thunk onto the floor caused an extra wave of the green smoke to come out of her and started to dissolve the carpet. Amelia screamed and ran out yelling for her mom and dad, but unknowingly she made the problem worse the more she panicked. Her body felt the adrenalin rush and the green smoke came out around her to protect her from what ever was causing her body to initiate the fight or flight instinct. It grew larger and larger every second, engulfing the walls and turning the furniture into clumps of mossy goo. By the time Amelia had made it outside her house was already half way dissolved, its walls falling down and disappearing leaving nothing but green goop. When her parents came home all they saw was an empty lot where their house had been and their daughter sitting on the side of the street crying. Not even the green goop was left when the police and firefighters came over._

That was the worst thing she had ever done. She still felt guilty for it, but what could she do about it now? Her parents obviously hated her from that moment on. Amelia checked her schedule notebook, taking note if she had finished all the homework in the list. She grimaced when she realized that she hadn't finished all of her math homework. What class would she have to finish it in? Perhaps history…yes, Mr. Dorobosie was the most boring thing to happen to the school since they changed from blackboards to whiteboards. Sometimes she wondered if the school was really that cheap to wait so long to get whiteboards. Even the elementary schools had them before this school.

As the day went on, Amelia started to pay more attention to the clock above the teacher's desk then the notes she was supposed to be taking. As time passed on desperately slow, her pencil started to move on its own accord across her paper, creating circles and faces smiling back at her. She started to add more detail to some of her swirly lines by the time the bell had rung, signaling the end of another normal day. Slowly she put all her papers and pencils into her backpack and gave her English teacher, Mrs. Sullovin a quite goodbye before heading into the catastrophic halls. Making a beeline for her locker, Amelia quickly grabbed her books and headed towards the door. As she walked, she avoided any contact with the other students, making her look like she was the only player left on one side of a dodge ball field. She easily ignored the small snickers that came out of some of the idiots standing next to their lockers.

"Hey look, it's the teacher's pet… want an apple to give to your favorite teacher?"

Amelia walked passed them without even a flinch. So she said goodbye or good morning to her teachers every once in a while, that did not classify her as a teacher's pet. Now that Eugene kid in science was a real teacher's pet. He sat in the front desk all day, asking for help on questions every five seconds and even entered small talk with the teacher when everybody had free time. Not that any of that was bad, but he did it practically everyday and in every class that she had with him. Amelia leaned into the school entrance way's door and stared at the sky as she walked out. The day was perfect. The air smelled soft and clean and the sky was a creamy shade of light blue, the clouds from earlier having disappeared. Smiling a little when the sun shined on her face, she walked out into the sidewalk and started to head home.

-----

It was early in the morning when the ground started to shake. At first Amelia ignored the slight shifting her bed made, but after a particularly large explosion erupted somewhere near the edge of the town causing a few of the possessions on her shelves to meet the dull carpet, she bolted awake. Trying to catch her breath, she climbed out of her bed, ignoring her own body's complaint of leaving the comfort and warmth. Peering out the nearby window, she noticed most of the neighbors had also woken up and had started to pile up on the street watching what seemed to be a large almost mushroom shaped smoke pillar careen into the night time sky, almost invisible to the human eye. She noticed, without surprise, that her parents were some of the few people on the street that did not make an effort to go outside. Instead she heard them argue together downstairs, but from her room it was more like grumbling.

Sighing she went back to her bed and stuffed herself further into the covers trying to reheat what warmth was left in the sheets. Soon after she could vaguely recall hearing the sirens of the city's police and fire departments as they scurried over to the site of the explosion.

-----

"Did you hear? They say that one of those crazy nut jobs from the psycho ward got out last night. He blew up like an entire city block! They had to get the Supers in there and…"

Amelia stopped listening to the girl seated behind her and tried to finish the small homework assignment that had been given to her class. She was having a hard time finishing it though because her entire class was filled with an electric current of energy, students shifting in their seats to talk to one another, others laughing at recent events, and some, the few she was actually somewhat paying attention to, were talking about the large explosion that had occurred earlier that morning.

According to the latest conversations, the explosion had been caused by a patient at one of the asylums from the next city over. Supposedly he came to hide, but her peers kept coming to the natural conclusion that the patient was, for lack of a better term, a nut job. A mentally ill human deranged from reality and no longer fit to be in the presence of society. Unfortunately none of the conversations had explained the fact that the patient had exploded a city block.

Amelia got up from her seat as the bell rang for the end of school. As she walked through the hall, the other students were busily talking to one another. It was all the rage to talk about any new attacks that happened to the city or anything else that included the super heroes protecting said city. So as usual the entire student body of the school was buzzing with the recent news. She sighed in relief as she closed the school's doors behind her, the sudden silence outside breaking the sudden dizziness she had felt inside listening to all the chatter. At the bottom of the steps she slid her backpack off her back and searched inside for her schedule notebook, once she brought it out she heard a small voice next to her.

"Hi."

Amelia turned toward the sound, mildly surprised to see a young boy stand next to her. He was obviously still in elementary school and Amelia vaguely wondered why he was here in front of the high school.

"Hello." She said automatically.

"Do you go to this school?" The boy asked, his blue eyes turning a lighter color as they caught some of the light from the sun.

"Yes. I'm a senior."

"Oh, that's cool. My brother is a senior too. Sometimes I think he's too stupid to be one though."

"I think that's pretty natural among most of the guys in this school." Amelia said half joking and finding herself relaxing as she talked with the boy. He had his hands stuffed in his denim overalls and often looked away searching for his older brother in the crowds that spilled out the doors.

"Jack!"

The boy's head moved to the side and then he walked away from Amelia, but before he went too far he turned around and asked for her name.

"My name's Amelia."

"It was nice mettin' ya!" Jack waved good bye and then ran towards one of the popular boys in school.

"_No wonder he has such nice eyes…"_ Amelia thought.

Dash Parr could be considered the most popular and sought after boy in the school. He was always with different cheerleaders everyday, smiling at every girl that walked his way, and cracking jokes with his friends while leaning on his locker in the hallway. Intellectually Amelia knew he was the best looking boy in school and she would admit that every once in a while she could imagine him talking to her and she would be the envy of the female population, but those were just daydreams. She felt no real attraction to him.

She watched them walk away and frowned a little as Dash told Jack not to talk to her. Jack retorted and Dash in turn noogied and tussled his younger brother's cream colored brown hair before they both got into a medium sized black car and it drove away. As the car disappeared from sight Amelia began to walk back to her house, hugging her shoulders as a gust of wind passed her.

-----

"I've done it!"

The loud shout of accomplishment echoed across the steel room as a small device was lifted up into the air.

"Ha, I've finally done it! The Incredibles won't stand a chance..."

A medium sized man clutched his newest creation in his hands as his eyes glazed over, dreaming of the sweet feeling of revenge and victory. Smiling to himself, he walked over to a nearby monitor, scanning the new specs, specifically those of Metroville. After reading some of the information, he coolly walked over to a nearby elevator, a slight jump obvious in his step. The elevator jolted up before steadying itself and continuing upwards. Coyly, the man smoothed down his gravity resistant hair, placed a helmet on his head and started up the closest vehicle next to him, a motorcycle. His finger raced across one of the pristine surfaces on the motorcycle relishing in the fact that it was free of dust and waxed to a shine so bright that if it was in the right position under the light it would blind anybody. The motorcycle roared as he rode away from his personal living area and headed straight to the city, ready and willing to test it out.


End file.
